


Sounds

by Clarebear



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 17:33:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8022880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clarebear/pseuds/Clarebear
Summary: Gallovich around season 1. Part PWP / part two boys being in love when they don't want to be.





	Sounds

When he lay in bed at night, it was the sounds that Ian thought of.

The slap of skin against skin, the angry squeaking of the shelf they were fucking against, the shallowness of Mickey’s breath as he neared the end. A grunt that could mean ‘right there,’ or ‘too hard,’ or ‘put your hand around my cock and jerk me off, you fucker.’

Mickey didn’t use words. He used his hands, grabbing the back of Ian’s neck, squeezing his hairline with his fingers to say, ‘don’t stop,’ and with more pressure, ‘I’m close. Don’t stop, don’t stop.' He used his hands to shove Ian down to his knees after he had finished and Mickey still hadn’t, wrestling to get his cock into the warmth of Ian’s mouth before coming.

Afterward, he would occasionally swear. “Fuck,” he’d say, jumping a bit to pull back up his jeans, fastening his belt. One time, he looked over his shoulder at where Ian was pulling his shirt back on. “Christ, Gallagher,” he said, shaking his head. But he didn’t say anything else, just wiped his thumb across his lip the way he did, and pushed past Ian out of the supply closet. Ian heard the crunch of a wrapper as Mickey grabbed a snack, and the chime as the shop door banged open and he strode out into the sunlight.

He was so loud. Everywhere Mickey went he announced himself—making noise and taking up space, making sure everyone knew he was there. It struck Ian that the only time Mickey was silent was during sex.

One night after close, when the lights were off and they were fucking against the cool glow of the refrigerators, Ian spoke with his lips against Mickey’s neck. “Is this okay?” he asked.

Mickey made a non-committal noise in his throat. He shifted, moving to his elbows, curving his back so Ian moved at a slightly deeper angle. Ian loved the way the muscles of his back looked like this, the sheen of sweat that covered his skin.

He ran his nose along the top part of Mickey’s spine, tasted the salt from his shoulder, his upper arm. His own breath came heavy, the hair in front of his eyes damp with sweat. “Good?” he asked.

“Fuck, Gallagher.” Mickey reacted beneath him. He grabbed one of Ian’s hands by the wrist and dragged it to the tightness in his groin. “Yeah, it’s fucking good, feel my fucking balls. Do you want a blue fucking ribbon or something?”

Ian came second, and had barely finished before Mickey was dressed again, kicking his feet into his worn-out shoes. “Don’t fucking do that again,” he said, yanking his sweatshirt over his head, “that lovey dovey pillow-talk bullshit. That’s not why I come here.”

But why Mickey came there, Ian wasn’t sure. There would be weeks when Mickey visited the shop every day, sometimes more than once, lurking outside for hours as he waited for customers or Kash to leave. Then there would be a month in which he disappeared. Gradually, Ian would quit craning to see out the window at the sign of anyone approaching, and would stop feeling an involuntarily jump of anticipation anytime someone burst in through the door. Then on a random Saturday morning, Mickey would come banging inside the shop, drawling some offensive remark as he stole a pop on his way back to the storeroom.

He would give a look over his shoulder, barely a glance. ‘Well?’ he would say to Ian without speaking.

What if I didn’t follow? Ian asked himself, as he was already locking the shop door, as he was already so hard that it hurt to walk the ten yards to the back room. What if I said no, that I wasn’t going to let him disappear and come back like nothing had happened. But then Mickey would be leaned lazily against the storeroom freezer with his dick out, and Ian would be on his knees in front of him.

Mickey used his hands here too. In the beginning to direct Ian’s mouth, to set the pace, the pressure. But now that Ian knew what he wanted better than Mickey himself did, Mickey kept his touch light, his palms weightless against Ian’s head as he bobbed back and forth.

Mickey’s head dropped back. His eyes closed. His fingers curled in the hair on the back of Ian’s nape. Ian drew his lips away with a wet noise.

“You missed me,” he said, looking up at him, not sure what had come over him, why his voice sounded so accusing.

Mickey’s eyes fluttered open.

“Admit it,” Ian said. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Not you, faggot,” Mickey said. He nudged his hips forward again, expecting Ian to take him back between his lips. “Your mouth, maybe.”

Ian stood up. “You missed my dick, too,” he said.

Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck off.”

“Why are you here?” Ian said. “There are plenty of other people you could be fucking right now. Why me?”

“Are you being fucking serious?”

When Ian didn’t respond, Mickey shook his head. He angrily began yanking up his jeans. “You’re a real cunt, Gallagher. You know that, right?

“So what, you’re just going to leave?”

“Better than listening to this bull shit.”

“I like it too, you know.” Ian grabbed his arm. “What we have… it’s—“

Mickey threw him off. “We don’t have shit.”

Ian swung at him, partially because he wanted to, but mostly because he needed to give Mickey the permission to rail back. The floor came up fast, Ian’s head slamming against concrete, the sense knocked far enough from him that he had to see rather than feel the punches that Mickey was delivering to his stomach. He rolled, throwing elbows, aiming for the soft places, the fragile bones. He was too outmatched to be careful not to hurt him.

But he didn’t want to hurt him, Ian realized as he caught a hook to the face. Not even by accident. Blood flooded his mouth from where his cheek tore against teeth. Ian moved his arms to in front of his face, curling to avoid the worst of the blows. He squeezed his teeth together as he waited for Mickey to realize he was no longer fighting back.

“Fuck,” Mickey yelled out, and his fist came down hard beside Ian’s face as he pulled a punch. “Fucking faggot coward, fight me back.” He shoved him in the chest. “Fight me back!’

Ian coughed. He spit blood onto the gritty concrete. He attempted to roll to his stomach so he could breathe better. Mickey almost didn’t let him, using the force of his legs around his hips and his body mass to hold Ian where he was. When he let him go, pulling his weight back, Ian staggered to his feet.

He coughed, stumbling a few steps away. He spit more blood onto the floor, and wiped his hand across his mouth as he looked at Mickey. Besides a bit of swelling above the eye, Mickey looked untouched.

Ian focused on breathing. He bent over, and coughed up more blood.

Mickey’s brow unfurrowed, the anger slowly draining from his face. “Christ, Gallagher.” He moved forward. “You okay?”

Ian nodded. Still bent over, his hands steadied himself on his knees. He spit again, and needed to use his hand to brush away the string of pink drool that hung from his mouth.

Mickey handed him some plaid fabric to use for the blood. Ian nodded his thanks. He wiped away the worst of it from the side of his face.

Mickey shook his head. “No, here,” he said. He took back the makeshift towel. He moved closer, pressing it against the cut in Ian’s hairline and holding it there. “You gotta apply pressure and shit.”

Ian watched him as Mickey held the towel, close enough to see the freckles on his nose, to smell his last cigarette. It became quiet except for the sound of their slowly steadying breath. Ian could hear the hum of the refrigerators, the sound of the occasional car passing by outside. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Mickey said, refusing to make eye contact. Until he did, his eyes flicking to catch Ian’s, and holding his gaze for a heartbeat, and then another, and one more, until it was Ian that needed to look away first.

Mickey lowered his hand. Ian realized that the cloth he’d been using was Mickey’s shirt.

“You know why I come here,” Mickey said. He glanced over his shoulder—because it was his habit to check if someone was watching, or because he wanted to look anywhere but at Ian—and did that thing where he flicked his thumb across his lip. “Stop trying to fucking make me say it, all right?”

Ian caught Mickey’s hand by the wrist. Mickey looked at him, and didn’t try to pull away. Ian nodded, and when he interlaced their fingers together, their hands held interlocked, Mickey let him do that as well.

“Okay,” Ian said.

Because they couldn’t talk about things, Ian collected the sounds Mickey made with same ravenousness that Frank went after booze. He stored them in the front of his memory, turning them over in his mind during the middle of school—the way that Mickey burped after finishing a PBR, how he sometimes snorted when he laughed too hard—and alone during the middle of the night, when Lip was asleep and Ian’s hand was slippery with lotion as he worked up and down his own cock.

He had to ration memories during these times, scared he was going to wear them out. Like the first time that Ian had tried flipping Mickey over to take him facing front, Mickey’s back on the storeroom freezer and his ankles propped against Ian’s shoulders. “What—?” Mickey had struggled at first, confused, before Ian made clear what he wanted. And then, “Shit,” as Mickey felt the new angle, his head thudding back against the freezer lid, his lower lip catching between his teeth. A few moments later, so quiet that Ian could barely hear it, a shaky “F-fuck,” as his neck stretch long, fighting to adjust to the new pleasure. Ian pressed a thousand kisses against the inside of Mickey’s lower calf, each one with a message that Ian knew better than to say. Praise and begging and gratitude and love me, love me, love me.

Ian was refusing to replay that one sound of Mickey’s—that breathy “Fuck” that slipped out of him without meaning to—on a Wednesday night around eleven when he heard tapping at his window. Wondering why Lip wouldn’t just use the front door when clearly Fiona knew he was sneaking out to have sex with Karen, Ian went to let him in.

Only it was Mickey who climbed through.

“What are you—what happened?” Ian asked, catching sight of Mickey’s face in the faint moonlight once he straightened.

Mickey shrugged him off when Ian reached for him to get a better look. Ian saw where Mickey’s eyes went and reached for him again, shaking his head. “He’s gone. Lip’s gone, it’s just us. What the hell happened? Who’d you fight?”

“Don’t.” Mickey brushed his hands away. The consonants came out blunted, from the crookedness in Mickey’s nose or how swollen his jaw was, Ian couldn’t tell.

“Your nose is jacked. You might need to go to Mercy—”

“Fuck off, Gallagher, all right? Christ, I don’t even know why I came here.”

Ian forced himself to hold still, giving Mickey his space. Mickey paced a bit, and made a move to go back out the window before stopping. From the shifting yellow light of a car driving by on the road, Ian could make out the full extent of the mottled damage to Mickey’s face.

“I’m going to fuck him up,” Ian heard himself say when he realized. “Your dad did this, didn't he? That’s fucking child abuse.”

“No shit,” Mickey said. The amusement that came through in his voice was the cold kind, a hopeless laugh that made Ian ache to wrap him in his arms and hold him like Fiona did Debby.

And it was only because Ian had been so trained to listen to Mickey’s sounds, was so familiar with the cadence of his exhales, that he realized something was different. Mickey’s breath was too shallow, too quiet, and catching unsteadily on the way in. Other than that, the tears came in complete silence.

“Mickey…” Ian couldn’t help himself from speaking, just as Mickey said, “He kicked me out.” A pause. Mickey wiped at his face. “He found some shit of mine—some gay shit—and said wouldn’t have a fag living under his roof. You know.”

“No, I don’t fucking know. Mick, look at me.”

Mickey didn’t move.

“Fucking look at me. If you won’t let me touch you, and you won’t let me ask questions about what the hell we are, the least you can do is fucking look me in the eye.”

“Gallagher—“  

“Fucking look at me!”

By the time Mickey finally turned, Ian was wiping away at his own eyes, furious that they were stinging.

“Is this always going to be us?” Ian asked. His voice was getting stuck in his throat; his cheeks were wet. “You standing three feet away from me, hurting, and me standing three feet from you, hurting, and us never letting ourselves close the gap? I’m so sick of this being so fucking hard. I love you. I want to hold you when you’re sad and fuck you when you’re happy and kill your bullshit excuse of a father for doing this to you. I want to be with you—all of you, in all the ways—and I want you to tell me you want that too. Do you love me?”  

Mickey shook his head. “Ian…”

“No. Don’t fucking use my first name. Don’t think about it. It’s a yes or no question—do you love me or not?”

“I can’t—“

“Do you love me!”

“Yes!” Mickey shouted. “Christ.”

“Say it!”

“I fucking love you, okay?”

Ian was on him. Not kissing him, because of his nose, but holding his face, the back of his head, pulling at his shoulders and pinning him against a wall because no matter how hard he tried to hug him, he wasn’t close enough. He smelled his neck and pressed kisses against every uninjured bit of him he could reach, and felt Mickey’s fingers twisting into his own shirt, clutching, as the tears came down faster. “I love you,” Ian told him, because now that he had let it out, he couldn’t keep it in anymore. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” And while Mickey didn’t say anything else, Ian listened, and held him, and collected one more of Mickey’s sounds for his memory.


End file.
